Heretic Queen

 

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For my mother

 

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Author's Note

Prologue: The Sacrificial Priest

Part I: A Wounded and Divided Land, 1558–1566

One:
The New Deborah

Two:
The Realm and the Ministers of Lucifer

Three:
Determined to Be a Virgin Queen

Four:
Many an Uneasy Truce

Five:
The Battle for Hearts and Minds

Six:
Untrustworthy Allies

Seven:
Christ's Soldiers

Eight:
Mary Stuart, the Great Catholic Threat

Part II: The Catholic Ascendancy, 1566–1580

Nine:
Betrayal amid Dreamy Spires

Ten:
The Iconoclastic Fury

Eleven:
Two Murders and Mayhem

Twelve:
An Ill-Conceived Escape and Rebellion

Thirteen:
Regnans in Excelsis

Fourteen:
The English State, Plots and Counterplots

Fifteen:
Massacre in Paris

Sixteen:
The Puritan Underworld of London

Seventeen:
Via Dolorosa

Part III: The Years of Religious Terror, 1580–1591

Eighteen:
God's Outriders

Nineteen:
The Ungodly Witch Hunts

Twenty:
Frustrating the Designs of Our Enemies

Twenty-One:
A Long-Awaited Execution

Twenty-Two:
God's Obvious Design

Part IV: A House Divided, 1591–1603

Twenty-Three:
The Norfolk Landing

Twenty-Four:
Marprelate, Puritans, Catholics, and Players

Twenty-Five:
Elizabeth's Eminence Grise and the Final Battles for England

Twenty-Six:
Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Also by Susan Ronald

About the Author

Copyright

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All authors have a team of active and apparently silent supporters that help to make their books possible. My outstanding agents, Peter Robinson and Michael Carlisle, stand in the first row of those who must be thanked, followed closely by my U.S. editor, Charles Spicer, my excellent copy editor, India Cooper, and the entire team at St. Martin's Press.

I am enormously grateful to the bishop of Coventry for our illuminating chat at Stratford-upon-Avon about the similarities and differences between Roman Catholicism and the Elizabethan settlement. I also thank Alan Brooke, Lady Antonia Fraser DBE, Sarah Gristwood, Alex Hoyt, Chris Laoutaris, Hugh Van Dusen, Alison Weir, and the teams of librarians at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, the London Library, and the British Library. Above all else, I thank my long-suffering husband, Doug Ronald, for his forbearance and unswerving support and to my mother for her belief in me. I dedicate this book to you, Mom.

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Religion was high politics in the Elizabethan era. From the time of the Lollards in the fifteenth century, religious tensions steadily rose in England and elsewhere, resulting in the Reformation—that smooth, seamless expression that most of us feel we understand. What is clear to me is that the Reformation was the biggest social, political, religious, and even economic change to hit European civilization, ever.

In our increasingly secular age, it is difficult for us to imagine just how much was demanded of the average English person living then. A stark choice between allegiance to the monarch or to the church and your immortal soul was laid before you. Patriotism and survival in this life or religious belief, custom, and the hereafter became the battleground for the hearts and minds of every English man, woman, and child. This invidious choice led to a series of wars—some hot, others cold—that were waged on battlefields and the high seas; in the countryside, cities, and towns; from church pulpits and places of work; at court and most especially in the home. It led to a new concept—patriotism. It affected everyone living then, and the outcome made England, the rest of Britain, and the Elizabethan and Jacobean colonies in North America what they were to become.

Elizabeth's middle way—neither Catholic nor Puritan—was a solution that pleased very few. Yet it was a solution that she maintained throughout her forty-five-year reign. For a queen renowned among her advisers for prevarication for its own sake, Elizabeth's Anglican vision shows her remarkable tenacity. She knew in her heart and mind that any wavering might mean civil war. After all, during her reign France was plagued with over thirty years of civil wars, and the Netherlands began its civil war to protect its ancient religious privileges—a war that lasted eighty years. Elizabeth believed that if she gave in to the reforming “godly” Puritans or Presbyterians on the one hand, or her Catholic population on the other, civil war could not be far behind. So she held fast.

Heretic Queen
will bring new people and faces from the Elizabethan era to populate its pages. Some familiar names like Mary Queen of Scots are central characters, though in Mary's case, I stress her links to France as a crucial part of the story. William Cecil (Lord Burghley), Robert Dudley (first Earl of Leicester), Francis Walsingham, and others will appear in their usual leading roles as privy councillors. Yet they will also wear new faces and don new clothing in their roles within the Catholic, Protestant, and Puritan leaderships. Foreign places and wars not often thought of as “Elizabethan” are also present, most notably the troubles in France and the Netherlands. These had a great bearing on Elizabeth's domestic, foreign, and religious policies. The generally unremarked turning point in Elizabethan international religious affairs was the arrival of the Duke of Alba in Brussels in August 1567, ostensibly to quell Philip's rebellious Calvinist subjects, but in effect to wage holy war. The background to this is essential to understanding the rest of the story.

What you, the reader, should try to do is to suspend the stereotypes of Tudor film and literature, and allow yourself to drift back to a time when religion was everything. Imagine yourselves in a world where before having breakfast you would have prayed once already. Imagine a daily routine based on religious rules and habits: a world where even the art on your walls—whether a cheap “stained” cloth or a ballad torn from a book or an expensive tapestry—had a religious theme; a world where your reading recreation was the Bible or a cheap chapbook that gave you access to the spellbinding sermons of Thomas Cartwright or Edward Dering; and a world where holding a different belief and preaching it could end very badly. Ultimately, it was a world where if you plotted against the queen's vision for England—even for the salvation of your soul—you would be imprisoned and probably executed on the grounds of treason.

*   *   *

One of the most
graphic ways in which religion was high politics relates to the date. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar that is still in use today. In October 1582, all Catholic countries of Europe moved their dates forward by ten days, which is sometimes termed New Style by authors, with the Julian calendar dates termed Old Style. By 1587, most of Europe used the Gregorian calendar. England, however, remained steadfast to the Old Style due to continued papal meddling in its internal affairs; that is, until 1752, when Britain finally accepted the change to the Gregorian calendar. While New Year's Day was on March 25 in Elizabeth's time, in the book New Year's Day is January 1 for ease of understanding. Also, from 1587, I've converted New Style dates to Old Style where necessary since the primary action takes place in England. Spelling has been modernized for ease of reading, into American English, save in the titles of books. People who were ennobled are known afterward by their new titles; for example, Sir Robert Dudley becomes the Earl of Leicester, or simply Leicester.

Heretic Queen
is the result of my historical study into the complex and fascinating issues surrounding religion and its influence on the politics of the day—fundamental issues that are not terribly different from those facing our world now. Those who thought they were “freedom fighters” were viewed as “terrorists” by governments throughout Europe, be they in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, or Spain. Tolerance was an alien notion to all but the Dutch and would remain so until the eighteenth century. Ultimately there was right and wrong on both sides.

What made the choices so stark came down to two main and juxtaposed belief systems. The Puritans believed that the Lord's Word was precise and that there were only black and white in the broad spectrum of color that the Christian faiths were rapidly becoming. The absence of the notion of “tolerance” in the Elizabethan era made the religious settlement that the queen strived for a dream of a utopia yet to exist. Elizabeth effectively attempted to establish a tolerant regime that would not “make windows into men's souls”; her solution proved imperfect, yet inspired for her day. It was a valiant attempt at creating a tolerant society, swimming against the tide of religious fundamentalism to the right and left.

A century later, Charles II would try to create a tolerant regime commencing with his Declaration of Breda just before he was restored to England's throne, and he failed as well. The issue of a Protestant or Catholic England rumbled on well into the nineteenth century. The fault was not in the flawed philosophies or policies of either Elizabeth I or Charles II but rather in the fundamentalist creeds of the English on both sides of the divide.

*   *   *

We all have
different histories and biographies depending on who is looking at us and how the author chooses to write about us. My last book,
The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire,
concentrated on how a genuine, terrifying domestic need for cash generated a swashbuckling foreign policy that gave birth to the British Empire. This existed alongside the burning religious issues of the day, with virtually all of the swashbucklers and their courtly patrons leaning toward the Puritan persuasion.

In
Heretic Queen,
I show how religion was high politics and how domestic policy was ruled by the religious imperatives of the Reformation, often overruled by other monarchs and a temporal papal authority beyond England's shores. I continue to explore how Elizabeth coped in a man's world, how she ruled so successfully, what motivated her, and in fact, what has made Elizabeth so unique in our hearts and minds for the past four-hundred-plus years. Above all else,
Heretic Queen
is the story of a monumental struggle of ideology and survival on all sides. Together these two books form my single biographical history of Elizabeth's reign.

It is my sincere hope that you will see Elizabeth better as a result. I also hope you can get a sense of what it was like to live in Elizabethan England through a new looking glass, offering you a fresh perspective of our now distant ancestors. It was an extraordinary period, not so different from our own. Above all, I do hope you enjoy the book.

Of course, any errors contained herein are entirely my own.